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Emily Short

Emily Short has been playing interactive fiction since the early 1980s, and writing it since 1998. Her work includes Galatea, an interactive conversation; Savoir-Faire and Metamorphoses, games exploring systems of physical magic; and City of Secrets, a story with a complex branching plot. With Nick Montfort and Dan Shiovitz, she ported and re-engineered Sierra's Mystery House in a project sponsored by Turbulence.org. She has written a number of articles on designing interactive fiction and is the editor of a book on IF theory and craft (in progress). She is also assisting Graham Nelson with the development of Inform 7, a new programming language for creating IF.

Emily Short interrogates Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations and finds his approach to videogame criticism too capacious in its attempt to account for a variety of expressive media, and too narrow in its focus on low-order choices in videogames.

Emily Short explains that one of the goals of Savoir-Faire is to teach the player to become a magician. This pedagogical orientation means that - in contrast to interactive fictions that allow only a severely limited range of player input - Short’s game rewards undirected play because the player is not only solving puzzles, but also learning.